Marriage Matters: Birds of a certain feather

Early in relationships, people often revel in the cliché that opposites attract. Yet after a short time of togetherness, most couples come to an understanding that opposites annoy.

By James and Audora Burg

Early in relationships, people often revel in the cliché that opposites attract. Yet after a short time of togetherness, most couples come to an understanding that opposites annoy. For most of our marriage, we had been nauseatingly compatible in nearly every way – except body clocks. And for Jim, that was particularly challenging. He would try to stay up long after he would have preferred to be asleep, just because Audora was up. But eventually he just gave up and knew that when he awakened in the morning, she would be there beside him, still two hours away from a full night’s sleep. For Audora’s part, she made a few attempts to get up before she absolutely had to, in an effort to experience Jim’s strange affliction. But being muddle-headed and bored were not strong reinforcements for making it a lifestyle.After her stroke, one of the most challenging adjustments for Audora was in the reckoning of time as it related to sleep cycles. She transformed from a full-on species of Night Owl to — nothing. Audora was no longer a night owl, but she also did not get along well with morning. For one thing, it started far too early.Audora and a dear friend of like persuasion – one who also shares her fondness for “ish,” as in meeting at 10’ish – used to joke about their common definitions of morning: Six a.m. may as well have been the middle of the night, eight a.m. was the crack of dawn, and 11:50 was comfortably mid-morning. So that narrowed down the frame for late morning to 11:59.It seems silly now, perhaps, but in the first months after the stroke, she struggled to accept that fundamental change in Circadian rhythms as a loss of her identity. She had been owl, hear her hoot – but quietly – so as not to disturb Jim, who was most decidedly not acquainted with that bird or its ridiculous hours.Then came Paul, and with him came a torturously long period of sleep deprivation. It was 18 months before he started to sleep through the night.Now, however, the metamorphosis seems to have come around to its next (final?) phase. Audora has become a full-fledged Morning Person – an identity that at one time would have been occasion for great anxiety, or even grief: Morning? What’s that? But she now knows what morning is, and rather likes it. She cheerfully wakes up, often before Captain Morning himself (Jim, not Paul), and quietly and contentedly goes about getting the family’s day started: making breakfast and packing lunches.Although we had previously learned how to cope with each other’s unreasonable and inexcusable sleep patterns, Jim is liking this chronologically-compatible Audora — and so is she. Now, if only Jim liked spending time in bookstores and Audora liked hardware stores...

James Burg, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Indiana University-Purdue, Fort Wayne. His wife, Audora, is a freelance writer. You may contact them at marriage@charter.net.